DOGE Goes Deep State
For much of the past decade, President Donald Trump and his allies have been waging a war against the so-called “deep state”—and the conflict has only escalated since Trump’s return to power.
There’s no official definition of the term, of course. Loosely, the deep state is the collection of bureaucrats, contractors, intelligence officials, and other official or even quasi-official entities that more-or-less retain their power no matter who occupies the White House or which party controls Congress. But it’s more specific than that. Implicit in talk about the deep state is the idea that certain individuals outside the official chain of command wield the true power in the federal government, and that they frequently ignore or thwart the will of the people’s elected and appointed representatives. In a nutshell, the deep state is undemocratic and unaccountable, even to powerful figures in the federal government.
Trump has cast the deep state as one of the chief antagonists of his populist movement, in no small part because such movements always require enemies (and the less well-defined the better). Much of what the second Trump administration has done so far—from the mass firings of federal employees to the appointment of unorthodox leaders at the Pentagon, FBI, and other key outposts—is probably best understood as a direct assault upon this perceived opponent.
But at the same time that he’s focused on dismantling the deep state, Trump seems to have built his own undemocratic, unaccountable executive apparatus.
How else should we view the incident that The Washington Post reported on last week involving Elon Musk, the unofficial head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio?
As DOGE was slashing its way through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rubio issued a waiver ensuring that “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” should continue, despite the announced shutdown of USAID. “Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House,” the Post reported. “But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [Luke] Farritor and [Gavin] Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.”
As a result, USAID clinics that were supposed to be protected by Rubio’s order were shuttered.
That is an almost perfect illustration of how conservatives used to believe the deep state operated—with unele
Article from Reason.com
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